HOW can memorials powerfully remind us of past horrors? How can they keep the atrocities of the past alive and relevant? 

Micha Ullmann's Berlin memorial commemorates the fascist blaze, when 90 years ago today, on 10 May 1933, 20,000 works by a great number of German and international authors were devoured by the flames before an ecstatic crowd. 

While the directive for burning books was aimed at “left,” democratic, and Jewish literature, the vast majority of the books burned in Bebelplatz, the Square at the State Opera, Berlin, came from the library of Magnus Hirschfeld, the pioneering sexologist and campaigner for sexual equality, and were a public resource dedicated to exploring the diversity of human sexuality in a way that was extraordinarily progressive for its time. 

The People’s Commissar of Public Health in the Soviet Union Nikolai Semashko was among many prominent visitors and supporters of Hirshfeld’s research.

This vast archive, and its deliberate destruction by the fascist state, is the fact most often overlooked in recollections of the rise of fascism, and it is important to recollect both which kind of knowledge they aimed to destroy, and who enacted it.

The book burnings in Berlin and Heidelberg, the “oldest university in Germany,” were carried out by the German Student Union (German: Deutsche Studentenschaft, DSt), an organisation that had become dominated from the late 1920s by Nazi ideology. The then leaders of the Berlin and Heidelberg student unions Gerhard Kruger and Gustav Adolf Scheel orchestrated and enacted the burnings. 

The subsequent careers of these student politicians demonstrates the continuity of Nazi ideology in the post-war period. 

Kruger had a position in the party that policed all publications for conformity with Nazi ideology and was never prosecuted. After the war he stood (unsuccessfully) for the neonazi Deutsche Reichspartei, continued to disseminate neonazi literature through his own journal and book club, and died in 1994. 

Scheel was elected to the Reichstag and as military service headed Einsatzgruppe III in Alsace and was involved in the deportation of Jews from that area, and later Karlsruhe. He rose rapidly through the SS. After the war he was arrested and released in 1948, and then arrested again for infiltrating a circle of neonazis into the Free Democratic Party, and released again. He died in 1979. 

Ullmann’s memorial is located on Berlin’s Bebelplatz — underneath it, to be precise. It is discretely underfoot by day, but by night, an eternal light illuminates it.  

The memorial is a seven-square-metre space, five metres high, plastered white, with empty white wooden shelves lining its sides. They could accommodate 20,000 books. Ullmann demonstrates loss — loss of knowledge, experience, art, pleasure — and the emptiness reflects a cultural void. 

The space can be viewed through a 1.2 square metre pane set into the paving of the square. 

During the day, the sun, clouds and people, too, are reflected in the pane and it takes a certain effort and concentration to perceive the empty shelves through the small pane. However, this is part of the artistic concept. To approach history, to fully grasp it, takes effort. 

The pane becomes an intersection of the present and the past — the Now is reflected in this glass plate, which at the same time becomes a transparent grave slab, allowing access to the past. The viewer almost feels dizzy/ faint, as the window appears fragile — could one fall into the past here? 

This interface between history and the present also represents an interplay between the private sphere of a library and the public sphere of Berlin’s historic centre. Along with a grave, the empty library also invokes a protected space. Apart from the obvious loss, the imagination refills the shelves with the burnt books and keeps them in a safe place, like a bunker, in the exact place where the inconceivable happened. 

The eternal light functions doubly: it is the eternal light of remembrance, as well as a source of energy where shock can turn into insight and resistance.

Micha Ullmann’s family fled from Dorndorf in Thuringia to Palestine in 1933, where he was born in Tel Aviv in 1939. 

His basic idea for the Berlin memorial is grounded in a symbolism that is a leitmotif in the artist’s work. 

Another memorial based on the excavation of a pit is his first important work “Messer/Metzer” from 1972. Together with young Palestinians and Israelis, Ullmann symbolically exchanged soil between the Arab village of Messer and the Jewish Kibbutz Metzer, neighbouring villages whose names both mean the same thing in Arabic and Hebrew: Border. In both locations, pits of the same size were dug and filled with the soil of the other village. Here, too, there was hardly anything visible on the surface. Here, too, the viewers are challenged: they have to approach, see and want to understand what is being presented.

The Berlin memorial importantly emphases the beginnings of fascism. The torching of books heralded the unimaginable. Very close to the memorial is a plaque, also set the square’s plaster stones, with Heine’s prophetic words from his tragedy Almansor: “This was a prelude only, where you burn books, you will, in the end, burn people. (Heinrich Heine 1820)”. 

It should not be forgotten that the fascist concept of Gleichschaltung (enforced conformity) remains very evident today, where thinking independent of the establishment is suppressed and made punishable by law. 

As fascism grew, almost all  German writers left their home country. Very few authors stayed. Erich Kastner was one of the few who remained in Germany and was also the only author who witnessed the book burning in Berlin which engulfed his own work, including his novel Fabian (1931, The Story of a Moralist, in English translation). 

In his 1950 preface to a new edition of the novel, Kastner described his aim as pointing to the abyss towards which Germany was moving. The novel criticises above all the passivity of those who recognise the dangerous deterioration in society but do nothing about it.